Every tiny decision is costing you 🔋 Barry Cryan

In business, we look to be lean, we look to be efficient, we look to cut costs. But actually, there's one tax that is hidden and doesn't show up on any balance sheets, and it's the cost. Every time we have to sit down and decide what comes next, it costs us 11 to 24 minutes. Every time we get distracted, every time we switch tasks, every time we get interrupted, there's a massive hidden tax there. What got us here won't get us there, because that's the point we start to plateau, we start to become a bottleneck. What can alleviate that? Well, it's hiring more people, and it's maybe working longer hours. That's where systems comes in. Because systems allows us to tap into those next levels without just having to work longer or work harder. But for me, the root cause—it's all those micro decisions stacking up. We all have certain zone of genius, and it's a struggle sometimes for people to get as much time as they need within that zone. So AI operators—it'll help them within the hours available. They can work through things faster, which could give them some extra time back. But it's the builders really that are going to be the ones that get a massive competitive advantage over their rival down the road or. their marketplace, because they can have systems that work in the background that allows them to step back so they can spend their time and energy in their zone. And for me, that's what AI is all about.

This week's Millennial Master is Barry Cryan, who helps business owners stop work and decisions constantly flowing back to them. Barry calls it the invisible tax. Every interruption or quick question chips away at your attention and makes the business more dependent on you. In this episode, We talk about why tiny decisions quietly eat into your day, how AI can remove work instead of making it faster, and what changes when your team stops needing you for every answer. Barry, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining us from today?

Thanks, Daniel. Great to be here. I'm coming from Sligo here in the northwest of Ireland.

Okay, so we're relatively close compared to the interviews last week, but I want to get straight into it because this one's going to be a really interesting conversation. I've written recently about the one-person business and how this is getting closer and closer thanks to AI and the developments in that. But also, you've got this distinction between AI operators and AI builders. So I'm hoping you can explain that before we dig in.

When it comes to AI I like to look at it within almost a couple of planes of vision. And AI operators are where most of us are at in terms of we're using AI to basically help us maybe move through our day faster in terms of maybe responses to emails, okay, helping us work through stuff, maybe building out presentations or reports or, but it's essentially speed to outcome. It's helping us to get to an outcome faster where the AI builders really are It kind of allows us to step back out of the equation a little bit. AI builders are almost like the systems that will build the outcomes for you in terms of automation. One of the most important areas for me and people I work with is their zone of genius. We all have a certain zone of genius, and it's a struggle sometimes for people to get as much time as they need within that zone of genius. So AI operators will, it'll help them within the hours they have available. They can obviously work through things faster, which could give them some extra time back But it's the builders really that are going to be the ones that get a massive competitive advantage over their rival down the road or their marketplace in general. Because what they can do is they can have systems essentially that work in the background that allows them to step back out of stuff. It could be invoicing, it could be admin. It allows them to step back out of that so they can spend their time and energy essentially in their zone. And for me, that's what AI is all about. It's having the tools and it's building processes, systems, automations in place to allow the leaders, the business owners to actually step back more and more and to take that reclaimed capacity to spend it in their own needs, not just to help them work through paperwork faster. Okay. It's essentially released them from that stuff. But in a lot of cases, they don't maybe really enjoy doing anyway.

Well, in any business, the founder will have to do things that they don't enjoy. And Hopefully a lot of the stuff that they enjoy. So you made this distinction now. So we know the AI operator is the one who basically uses ChatGPT or Claude to do the same thing faster. Is there a way that feels productive? You think, I'm going to use AI to respond to my email, but actually changes nothing underneath? Because, for example, if I would use it in writing or to respond to my emails, I still have to do the same checking. I still have to make sure that it's on track with what I needed to say. And sometimes I spend just as much time as if I would be doing it myself altogether from A to Z. Is that a trap?

Yes, I think it is. And what can happen is we throw mud against the wall and hope something sticks in terms of the tools we're using. When it comes to these tools, there's so many tools out there. There's so many things we can do. Everyone's on about Claude and ChatGPT and all the rest. But actually, Is what you're doing the most effective route to the outcome that you're essentially after? Okay, say emails as an example. There's a certain outcome that you want when it comes to those emails. Okay, you want, okay, it's obviously reply to that person faster. You want to have, you know, it in your style, your voice. You don't want to spend ages having to maybe go back over it or redo it because it's not right. So it's having the right tool for the job, but using it in the right way for you and what your outcomes are. And that's where I'd always start. people. I don't start based on, okay, you know what, it'd be great if we could work our way through our emails faster, if we didn't have to do our emails or whatever it might be. Where I'd always start was at the end in mind. Okay, let's see how you want things to run, look and feel within your days, within your business, how many hours you want to work, revenue. What I'd always be doing is reverse engineering back from that point. And then it's, for me, it's the systems or the vehicle that'll help you get there. It could be ChatGPT, it could be Claude, or it might be a combination of things. But I'd always start with the end in mind to come back from that point, because that's going to be your most effective solution to the outcome that you're after, rather than doing maybe what the guy down the street is doing.

So what's one example where AI would actually remove the work that you would have to do as a founder, rather than just making it quicker?

Well, there's, I think there's never been a better time to be alive in terms of business right now. What are the kind of things that like, you know, AI could do that, that means that we're not in the weeds? Well, for example, I suppose I'm on my own best example, content generation ideas. So I used to spend a huge amount of time like coming up with content, generating ideas. But now I've built using AI a content idea generation machine where again, it's reverse back from the outcome that I want. Okay. And how do I take myself out of the equation? Well, I have a machine now that will actually take my calls. With, it could be with people I speak to on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It could be clients. It could be people that need help with a certain area. And what it does is it'll scan those calls for ideas. Okay. It could be like a pain point that someone needs help with. It could be a specific challenge. What it does is it scans through that. So it's built into the brain of this GPT, basically. And once it kind of sees and scans that transcript, it'll pull in those specific ideas and those trigger points, and it'll actually build it out. Into something that at the end of the month is ready for me to record. So like that literally sits sitting there for the end of the month, like a monthly recurring schedule with a video editor. And all I'm doing then is sitting down and he's like uploading this. I'm talking through it. That used to form a huge part of my weeks and ultimately my months content. It could be, it could be LinkedIn, it could be video, it could be edit, but now there's a full bank of content. Okay. That I can just talk through even from when it comes to maybe, maybe LinkedIn or other things, it'll actually take that content, it'll actually schedule it for me. So again, it's taken me out of the equation, it's taken somebody else out of the equation because it was a VA that used to actually do it for me. But now AI allows me to actually completely step back out of that and allows me to spend my time providing that value to people in terms of, okay, sitting down and recording the videos. AI can actually do that right now as well, but I'm still not just comfortable with that in terms of AI clones and all the rest. Still prefer to record my own stuff. So that will be Definitely one part of the equation. That'll be, that'll be keeping me up for another little while.

One of the things that I know you talk a lot about, Barry, is that the business owner can become the system and the business itself, and in a way, too central to the business. And I spoke with this with a couple of guests in previous weeks as well. Where does this usually show up first, that the business can be too dependent on you?

Typically, it shows up in the amount of time they're getting on the business, and in the amount of hours that they're actually working. So when I often sit down with people, one of the first things I'm almost scanning for is the number of micro decisions they're making across the day, across a typical week. And what I'd be finding with a lot of those types of business owners, way too many micro decisions that they have to make to create a specific outcome. Everything becomes a micro decision, what to do, how to do it, when to do it. And what happens is that ultimately becomes the bottleneck in the business because there's only so many decisions we can actually make and get right for ourselves, for our team. Because what that does is the business grows and gets more complex. The number of micro decisions stack and gets more complex. Maybe we add people, maybe we have new processes, new products. What happens is if systems don't scale at the same pace, all those additional micro decisions end up just right back to you. That's what sucks us into the business. That's what keeps us working longer hours. And that's essentially ultimately what actually costs us within the business, because there's a point when what got us here won't get us there, because essentially that's the point we start to plateau. We start to become the bottleneck. What can alleviate that? Well, it's hiring more people and it's maybe working longer hours. That's where systems comes in because systems allows us to tap into those next levels without just having to work longer or work harder in order to do it. But for me, the root cause, it's all those micro decisions stacking up. And that's what we want to alleviate just using better systems.

So you call this the invisible tax, right? What, what is that tax in real terms besides the more time spent into a business? You said, you talked about this plateau. Does that mean that you can only service so many customers or you can only reach so many people?

All of those things and many more, but that's a great question. Yeah, it's something I like to call the invisible tax. In business, we look to be lean, we look to be efficient, we look to maybe cut costs, but actually there's one tax that is hidden and doesn't show up on any balance sheet or report. And it's going back to those micro decisions like Every time we have to sit down and decide what comes next, it costs us 11 to 24 minutes. Every time we get distracted, every time we switch tasks, every time we get interrupted, 11 to 24 minutes. So there's a massive hidden tax there. 11 to 24 minutes. If you think even that happens 3 times a day, which for many of us, it's more than that, that's up to an hour a day. It's 5 hours a week. That's 5 working weeks of time a year. Now, I'll give you an example. I'm sitting down with a guy I work with. And we looked at what his hourly rate is worth. So we calculated basically his turnover divided by 2,000, which is roughly 40 hours a week, you could say. His hourly rate was worth €2,500 an hour. And when we showed them actually the client cost associated with losing all that time from that hidden tax, it was costing them easily over €100K, conservatively over €100K a year alone, just him. Actually, if he was able to redirect some of that reclaimed capacity and actually put it back into working on specific areas within the business, actually that $100K could be worth much, much more actually to him and the business. So there's a massive cost we're paying there. There's an opportunity cost as well. You touched on it there. If we're paying that tax over and over again, there's an opportunity cost with the things that we're not getting to, things that we want to do, the things that we just haven't time for right now. The thing, it could be business. It could be new products. It could be maybe working on the business. It could be spending time at home with the kids and so on and so forth. So we pay a massive tax there. And again, what's the root cause? It's micro decisions when it comes to your team, when it comes to stuff routing back to you, deciding what to do, when to do it. And then we have to manage all the other stuff in our life, the email that pops in, the WhatsApp, the urgent thing that the client that needs something at the last minute. What happens is all those things stack up in our day. That is the tax we pay. Some people, they're like, you know what? It's not that bad for me. Even 15 minutes a day lost is an hour a week. It's one working week of time a year. And if someone said, here's one working week of time now, you go and work on business for that week. What could we, what could we all do? It's massive. Our time is our money. And we don't realize it. It was only when I calculated that for that guy, he was like, oh my God, I didn't, I hadn't a clue. This is what we're losing. And this is actually where I'm spending most of my time in the business. And that was his lightbulb moment to actually buy in and actually start changing things.

So what's the kind of tiny decisions, these micro decisions that a lot of business owners ignore because they feel too small to matter, but they add up in a day?

Well, it could be everything and anything big and small. Everything you have to make decisions. So it's the email pops in. Do I respond to it now? Do I delegate it? Well, I just leave it and I'll come back to it later. Or will I action it? Or what will I do? Okay, now there's a call coming in. Jesus, I'm in the middle of something. Will I answer it now? Will I come back to it? You know, what's the person looking for? I hop on the call. How long am I going to be on the call? Every single small thing massively adds up. And it's not even all the small things. It could be bigger decisions. Your team needs answers for this, that, and the other. They're coming to you. They're interrupting you during your day. There's essentially too much routing back to you in one shape or form. Even when it comes to your team, they don't have maybe decision-making frameworks, maybe they don't have systems themselves or playbooks that they can follow to create the outcomes, or maybe they don't essentially trust themselves that they actually have the answers. For example, one of the rules I use with a lot of clients is the 1-3-1 rule. You have a team member coming to you, they're not coming to you with problems anymore, they're coming to you with solutions. So what is the problem?

That's a dream.

What are the potential options here to solve this problem? And there's that one What's the— out of those 3, what's the one thing you think we actually need to do here? Like, that's a tool in the toolbox that reduces micro-decisions. But guess what? When people get used to actually doing, say, the likes of that, people build a certain confidence in themselves, and actually they realize they actually have the answers. So now what we have is a process where people come back to you just a bit less, a little less and less, because that muscle for them is growing and getting stronger. Other example, I've known a guy, he's an engineering company. And his team were just, especially in morning time between 8 AM and 11, 11:30, huge amount of people flooding back to him, questions, queries, how do you move this? How do we solve this? There's a problem over here. So we went one simple change to his day. Okay. We created 2 open door slots in his day. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Unless there was a fire, like nobody could come to him outside of those open door slots. And we framed it as a positive thing in that, look, we're, we're creating these open door slots for you and the team. Because I want you to come up to me with these issues and questions and queries. But I'm open. My open door time is between this time, this time in the morning, this time, this time in the afternoon. So what do we do? We funneled all those micro-decisions to windows in this day, which actually, it was more like instead of 10 queries and questions in the morning, it was one planned interruption with those 10 questions. So now we've reduced 10 micro-decisions down to one. We're not, we're taking away that. Task switching cost, that invisible tax that we're paying. But actually, when this team comes to them, it's not 10 questions anymore. It's like 4, maybe 5. It's a fraction of what it is because guess what? People start to solve their problems themselves. So it's the right systems and it's right tools for both the leaders in the business and others. Another massive one is the friction between sitting down, deciding what to do and actually doing it. That's another micro decision. And actually that friction stops us getting stuck into something. Tell me about that.

Tell me about that, how it stops you, because I can kind of like see myself into it, but I want to break down the mechanics of that.

So we have hundreds of options when it comes to what are we going to do? You know, we've all these big things, maybe the project we haven't quite got to yet. We've got the emails, we've got a call with guys to get back to. When we come in in the morning, there's a huge amount of friction to getting started because we have to actually sit down and decide, actually, where do we So much to do. Where do we even start? So you should know what to do at any given day and time, why it matters, and how it connects you to the outcome you want at the end of the day. So one of the things we build in to course correct people's plans throughout the week is something called the daily shutdown. One of the key purposes of that is so they're so clear and specific about exactly what that first thing is that they need to nail early in the day, first thing when they sit down, so they can come in and slide into that first Important task. What I do is, in tandem with that, I have a 90-minute focus block at the start of every day. We're there to work on 1 or 2 on-the-business-type tasks. So it's like the eat the frog concept. They come in and they can slide straight into that task. There's no friction to getting started. So what we do is, like in finance circles, we talk about paying yourself first. What we're doing is we're paying ourselves first with our time with that first 90 minutes. So there isn't a meeting there somewhere. You don't have to decide about, well, it gets stuck into emails. It's a 90-minute block in your calendar. We treat it as importantly as if it's a client meeting. They sit down and they just get stuck into it. And that takes a huge pile of friction out of the way. Knowing what to do and when to do it, it's a massive thing because there's always more to do than time, no matter how well we're set up.

So what would be, say, one of the first practical things you'd actually change in order to start implementing these systems? Where do these systems get written down? Do they apply just for the founder or how do you communicate them with the team?

The first place I'd always start is we just do an audit. So I built a GPT that will actually track their time over, over a period of say 2 weeks. Now for anyone else, it can be as simple as a timer. Every 30 minutes, your timer goes off, you write down what you've done. Okay. Timer goes off, you write down what you've done and you stack that over a minimum of a week, but ideally 2 weeks. Then what you can do is you can rate them all. Okay. On a score of 1 to 10. 10 on the business type task, revenue generator, 1 the opposite. And I mean energy level, okay? 10, high energy, really enjoy doing this. 1, drains me, would love if I could just give it to someone else. And then what I want people to do is I want them to look back through those tasks. And the first thing is, what are the repeatable type tasks? Okay, emails is a classic one, communication type tasks, WhatsApps, getting back to people. What are the other ones? Admin type tasks, okay, quotes, Invoice and maybe some of that other stuff. But there's repeatable things we do. What's one of the repeatable things I do? Say it's marketing type stuff, social media type stuff. So what we want to do is reduce the amount of steps and the most microtasks we have to make. So say for me, I put out a new video every day, for example, on say Instagram.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. I've come up with the idea, build the script, set it up, record it, get it edited, all the rest. There's 6, 7 different steps there. 6, 7 different steps by 30, 30 days in the month, it's like over 200 different actions or micro-decisions I have to get right to get that outcome. But instead, what I do is I have one block once a month where I batch a lot of that together. So again, I've reduced 210 actions down to about 7 actions or micro-decisions. So I've taken a whole pile of friction out of my way. So what I do is I build what I call power blocks, and that's what I'd recommend. And power blocks are where you can batch similar type tasks together into windows where you can reduce the frequency and you're taking out that invisible tax. of setting up and starting something new every time. One of the simplest, most efficient ways you can do that is think about the communications type stuff on your day. Look at your time block. How much time do you spend on emails, communication, getting back to people? Research shows that most people spend like 3.5 hours on average on emails. If you think, take out lunch and break, that's like half a day. It's a huge amount of time. But what are we doing? It's an email now, which is another email's popped in and we're We're dipping in and out of emails constantly throughout the day. So what I'd be saying is batch those into power blocks, maybe twice a day. You hit and blast through all your emails, getting back to people, communication type stuff, because you're creating a cleaner runway throughout the other periods of your day. So you have a cleaner runway to getting the more important stuff done, but you're actually more efficient at dealing with the emails and that kind of stuff as well. I'd do the same for admin, admin, or any of those other repeatable things. And that will become really clear when you can look at that actual log that you've built. So I'll be taking similar type tasks together, blocking them into your calendar as power blocks. And I don't even think about that social media. I don't think about the emails until it comes time for me to do that one thing. It's amazing how much more efficient we can do. But what are we also doing? We create more space and capacity in your day now as well, because emails and admin and all these other things aren't just a drip, drip, drip, drip, drip through your day. Now they're funneled into windows in your day, which gives you more capacity and more free space.

Because you're big on interruptions, Barry, because you say that when you get interrupted, you lose your focus when you restart a task or you move in between. And like you said yourself, a new email comes in, maybe you've done it in that power block hour. But say a client responds to you, are you going to wait until like the next power block or the next morning to respond to that email? How do you tackle that interruption?

It's not an interruption to me because notifications are off. Turn them off. Golden rule is my emails only during those, those times. And if someone has to wait, A couple hours with the next list, so be it. If it really is that important, somebody will find a way of getting a hold of us. For example, a guy I was working with, going back a couple of years, it was only into maybe a month or two of working together. Eventually he said, actually, the real reason, Barry, I came to you was I lost contract worth a million and a half, would have kept my guys in work for over a year. And he said, what was I doing? Emails and calls, responding back to everything. And he said, I was doing all these little bitty things. I didn't nail down the one big thing that would have helped us the most. And that's what I see all the time. Our client, our team, they don't thank us for getting all these little bitty and always responding back quick to an email if we don't get the product out the door or shipped or delivered on time. Our team don't have a job in 6 months. No one thanks us for all the other stuff. So again, it's a recalibration ourselves. We can look at it as being more selfish for ourselves, but I feel it's being selfless because that's how we can better serve our clients. That's how we can better serve our team around us. And again, it's just sometimes it's calibrating the way we're thinking, just a little shift in mindset because we don't have to be always reactive and always on. There is a better way. And actually the benefits from it far outweigh any negatives that we might have in our mind.

So you mentioned one of the things that a lot of people do is when tasks pile up is that they hire more people. But then you can easily end up in this situation. Again, something I've written about and heard from lots of founders that the team still needs you for everything. All these micro decisions that you mentioned, and you can try and put processes in place or simply ask, come with solutions, not problems. And even that landed me in a time trap.

Yeah, I see it a lot. And there's people listening here that know that feeling. We've hired the extra people and actually we're still as busy as it was. I'm still putting in the same hours. What's actually going on here? There's more micro decisions that have been stacked within the organization. We haven't given people the processes they need. So what I'd always say is, okay, we optimize, systemize how things are right now. And then at that point, you have a much clearer idea, a much clearer vision. On actually who do you need here. But if you have hired, or if you're about to hire, or you have team, what I'd always be saying is they need playbooks that they can run off. Because without playbooks, they're always making micro decisions about how to do things, when they're going to do things, who owns it, why it matters, how does it tie us to the outcomes. So what I'd always have, say, my own team, clients, I'd always get them to have playbooks for all the repeatables. And again, when you actually track your time, it becomes more clear what those are. And I built a GPT that'll actually track how the task has been done. It'll build out the playbook in real time with a screen record of how it's to be done. But you can do that very quickly and simply. Use the likes of Loom. Take a screen— you're already doing the task, your team is already doing tasks, why not take a Loom video of it? So record your screen. All you're doing is you're talking through how you're doing it. You can run that through the likes of Claude or ChatGPT, and it will actually build you out. a playbook, a step-by-step, and then they can— it's almost like your Bible. So if you think about the repeatables within your business, quickly and easily, actually, you could build up a stack of these playbooks. Now your team is operating off these checklists, these processes. If you think about brain surgeon, think about airline pilots, they're so capable. You really couldn't find like better, better competent professionals. But what do they do? They all have checklists that they operate off to create a predictable outcome. Why should we be any different? And if you listen to, if you've ever read the book, The Checklist Manifesto, it's so, so powerful to have a process and checklist in place because that's the only real way you can create predictable outcomes. And then what happens? Your team needs you less and less and less and less because now they can run their own processes. Now they can understand how to create the outcomes you're after. Even decision-making frameworks. Another guy I was working with, his team kept routing decisions back to him for, like, one guy came to him, where to go and buy a Hoover, all these little things. So he just tracked actually what was happening. We built decision-making frameworks for his team so they could actually make decisions up to a certain level in his absence. That took about 80% of the queries and questions coming back to that one decision-making framework. So again, AI will be your buddy here. One of the little hacks I love with Claude or ChatGPT is Is that just get to talk to it and get it to act as a decision-making framework expert. Interview me and ask me the questions that you need the information about to help you build a decision-making framework for me and my business. And it's amazing. That's so, so powerful, actually, what it'll come up with. You can actually hand that decision-making framework to your team, train them on it, and now they have a process that they can actually follow to present stuff right back to you. So Systemization, be it processes, be it decision-making frameworks, be it systems, whatever it might be, that's what keeps us out of the needness, the questions, the queries, and so on and so forth. But it's also what allows things to run far more smoothly, far more smoothly within the business as well.

So you create these processes or write down these processes, you get AI to interview, I agree, and kind of like break them down. It can be super practical. And Nick, another previous guest, was explaining how He doesn't go on calls to respond to answers from his staff. He documents it, the question, adds it to a wiki or an operating system brain, whichever way you want to call it. But at the same time, when you hire new staff or when you start hiring your first staff, I know from my experience as well, one of the first traps is that you think, well, if a job's worth doing, worth doing it yourself. And then you don't allow that space for the employee or the colleague to take ownership. Of the task. So what has to be true before you can actually trust the team to own more of the doing?

So I get that a bit in terms of, look, it's just, it's quicker if I do it myself. But again, that's a repeat tax you pay over and over again, because to hand over a process to somebody and get to get it right, it's a one-time thing, whether you could be paying that tax every day, if it's a daily task or every week, if it's a weekly task. It's a little mindset shift, maybe at the starting point, where we can look again, cold hard light today at what those tasks are, how valuable they really are to your business in terms of like, say that guy, his time is worth €2,500 an hour. This is something that somebody that would pay €20, €30 an hour could do. That's a massive gap. And that, that's all a tax that he has to pay. And now that they're all initial steps that, yeah, doesn't get the person doing it right. But just allows you to kind of shift your mindset to actually, it's not, I have to do this. Actually, I have to delegate this task. This has to happen. And it just allows you that freedom to do it because our business is our baby and we want to hold on to it. And I want to hold on to our baby tight, but it just allows you to release the grip a little bit and hand it over and to trust that that person will do it. But the next level then is having the documented process first, because if you do, You can step back out of it, and all you're doing then is a higher level of inspecting what you expect. So when you hire a person that you feel is right for it, you have to release them then. Okay, this is the playbook, this is the process. You give them that level of trust, you start looking at them at the level you want them to be, maybe not the level they're at, but at the level you want them to be. You have to release them to it, but you still retain an oversight because you're inspecting what you expect. So if you release them, you have the right person in place, you have a process for them, a playbook for them, Really, I see it all the time. You cannot go too far wrong. You really can't, especially when you're up here still inspecting what you expect. So you're not in the weeds of it all the time, but it could be specific KPIs that you're checking in on. It could be progress. It could be one-to-ones. But even at that, it allows you to step way back out of it. And it's like a muscle that gets stronger. The more you do this, Daniel, the more you see, actually, the world hasn't ended because I gave this one thing away. And then you see progress and that builds the muscle and it gets a bit stronger. And all of a sudden you're now looking for the next thing that you could move off your plate, you know, because you start to believe and trust in the people you have around you. They have the right tools to actually engage with it and create the outcomes that you want then, you know.

So there's a difference then between empowering people and just leaving them to their own device in terms of making a decision. You might have the SOP or the process for it, and it might even include a decision framework, but sometimes you would find that even with all those things in place, staff would still need reassurance that what they're doing is right. And they would still come back to you for that micro decision that you are trying to get off your plate. How do you tackle that when everything is in place and you still get the question?

I tackle it with silence sometimes. And like, I know the guy who's working with him, this used to happen quite a bit with him. All you have to do when it was, you just got him to sit silent. And it'd get awkward. He'd be stopped in the corridor, maybe something like that. He'd be like, it'd get awkward. And then he'd say nothing. And eventually they're like, oh yeah, 1-3-1, 1-3-1, or maybe some of the other tools. It's just the easy thing now is just to give the person the answer. What you're doing is you're giving them the fish all the time. And then they don't go fishing themselves then, or they don't trust themselves to fish. So again, you give them the tools and then you have to give them a bit of space. And that's why people talk about open door policies. I'll be talking about closed-door policies, and that might seem controversial, but we create windows in our day where people can come to us. When they come to us, they need to come with solutions rather than questions and queries. And it's reinforcing to say, look, John, I can help you with this. Absolutely. If you need my help, you shout and I'll be there. But at the end of the day, I believe in what you're doing. You have the tools to do it. I trust in you. And this is what I'm paying you to do. And let that sit with them. I guarantee you, when you just reinforce that just a little bit at the start, people will get it. But the other thing they'll do is they'll start building that trust in themselves. It's not people are bad or people, you know, just want to put the monkey on your back. Actually, people don't have the confidence and trust in themselves that they're going to do it right, get it right.

That's the part that I was referring to. Yes.

Yeah. It just allows them. Look at them and talk to them at the level that you want to see them at, and then give them the space to actually grow up into that. Okay, grow up into the space that you're creating for them and reinforce them in the right way. And don't take the easy option to give them the fish. Always get them fishing, get them fishing, because that ultimately is what you're paying them for. And you know, as I said, the vast majority of people are well capable and really competent. And most of that group will do a really good job for you if you just Say empower them and show them that trust and that'll come back to you tenfold if you do.

So say you've put everything in place, you have the systems in place, you have a couple of staff, maybe 2, 3, 4, whichever level is that your business is at. But if you start super light and you're just a founder, how would you go about to say use AI to make your business less founder dependent? Instead of just being more efficient, which brings us back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this episode, those systems in place that you create to, in a way, replace humans. Would you agree to that?

Yeah. Yeah. And when I say replace it, I don't mean that you're not needed. I don't mean that AI is going to do your job for you, but it's just getting you into that zone of genius. We all have a zone of genius. That's where we need to be spending the most time. AI, for me, is just a tool that enables us to spend as much time in that zone of genius as possible. So one of the questions we often get, a bit like that, Daniel, is when we start our business, we can't really hire a load of people or do what a more established business can do. So where do we start? Well, again, it comes back to what you've tracked. What are the low-value, kind of low-energy type tasks right now? Okay. How could we maybe use the power of AI to eliminate them, to automate them, or to even just reduce the time we spend on it? But the other side of it is, look, we can't use AI for everything either. There's still stuff that people have to do.

For example, and you still have to check it. Do you use anything, any AI output without checking it?

Well, you have to, yeah. It's certain things. Absolutely. It's still human involvement. It may get to a point in the future where you don't have to check, say, even accounts and stuff like that. But right now, absolutely, you need to check that work, right? right now. For example, I was working with him, his invoicing was a really convoluted process. It was taking him 4 hours every week because it was so convoluted. And he said, like, there's no way AI can do this. No way another person could even do this. I have to do it. Guess what? He didn't do it because he just didn't have enough time for it. And cash flow issues were just coming behind him. So when we mapped it out again, we just tracked how it's currently being done. We're able to run it through AI to create a process that automated about 90% of it. We reduced that 4 hours down to about 20 minutes. But the other step was, okay, he still needs to do that 20 minutes. So this is where, okay, we didn't want to just hire somebody for like, okay, 20 minutes work. He had someone on his team that could actually do this. Virtual assistants is like—

Okay.

Virtual assistants like that will do this for a fraction of your hourly rate and do it really well. That's what I'll be saying to people that may be starting off in business. Okay, yes, we can always maybe use Where do we need actually people? Well, I'd always be using virtual assistants for the likes of that type of stuff. You can hire someone for 10 minutes a day, for an hour a day, 5 hours a month, doesn't matter what it is. So what we've done is, again, we tracked how the task has been done, we built out an AI-powered playbook, and then we handed that over to a virtual assistant that could do the thing that he wanted done, how he wanted it done, for a small fraction of his hourly rate. Depending on the country, depending on what you want them to do. But you could divert a virtual assistant for nearly anything from bookkeeping to accounts to social media to marketing. Again, it's how do you get more time? That's so ingenious. And how do we really keep the barrier of entry low? That's one of the most powerful things we can do actually, because now you have so many—

That's the step-by-step breakdown that you were talking about. That's the low barrier of entry, right?

Low barrier of entry. We have a playbook that allows them to do it the way you want them to do it, but it's low cost. It's low risk as well, because you can literally hire them for 2 hours and see how it goes. You can hire them for a month until you build a relationship and get to know them, make sure that they're doing it at the correct standard, they're the right person, all the rest. So there's such a low barrier to entry now to move that stuff off your plate. We're going to be sitting around on a beach with the feet up. What I'd be looking for—

That's the dream.

Yeah. The business owners actually come to me, they all say, actually, I want to work. I really enjoy it, you know. It is the dream for some as well, of course. It's how can we take that reclaimed capacity now and actually do something really good with it? It could be a new business idea. It could be charity work. It could be redirecting that capacity into working on the business. It could be spending time with the kids, the family, taking extra holidays. It's taking that reclaimed capacity now and doing something really tangible with it. It's not just— because again, work expands to fill the time available. We free up an hour, we could You know, fill it up fairly quickly with something trivial. So it's getting that reclaiming capacity back. It's redirecting into the areas. And again, that time lag that we talked about earlier, that's a massive step because it allows you just to see what those things are for you. Because even an hour extra back for you, again, a week, it's one working week at a time a year, all massively adds up. And also the other thing is it's one less hat you need to wear. It's like you can just close down that extra tab on the browser of your mind and It's what, that's—

there's a whole window with like 70 tabs as it is for most of us. So you basically want to be productive for the rest of the stuff that you don't fully enjoy, but take your time with the bits that you do enjoy.

100%.

What do you see founders still getting wrong about productivity then?

The biggest thing for me, is they try to manage their time better. And that might seem odd, but people are using the same tools we were using 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. When you try to manage your time better and get more productive, what happens is you can get more efficient, okay, and you may save some time. But when you apply the power of systems, what you're doing is you're applying levers to what you do. I don't have to spend an hour, okay, of working harder and And maybe longer to create the same outcome. I could use a system. I could use a process. I could use AI. I could delegate the task and not do it at all. That's how we get into those next levels within our business. It's not by working harder or longer or being more efficient with the time, with the 12 hours we're already working.

So what would be an actual good sign that AI is changing the way Your business runs. Maybe you have the example from your business where you created custom GPTs to help you A, create processes, or B, get back to clients. What's the sign that you track besides getting an hour back, a day, or is it like a minimum amount of time you want to get back? Because sometimes you can spend a week building this automation for a task that takes 15 minutes a week, and you could just do it the way you did it before?

What I typically do is measure baseline. We see what's happening right now. We see where people's time and energy is spent. But we also do it again at milestone points down the road because we want to make sure that we're doing the right thing. But we also want to make sure of progress as well. And again, progress is addictive. When we see that progress, when we've seen that difference in how we're doing things, it allows us to manage better. Because we're measuring better. But the other thing it allows us to do is it gives us that 10,000-foot view that actually we are heading in the right direction here. So it's really difficult sometimes when we're still busy to see actually have the changes we made made any difference or not. So it's measurement. Measurement is such an important thing at key milestones. And there's no one-size-fits-all. It could be for someone, could be an hour a day, could be an hour a week, could be 20 hours a month.

So if somebody tuning in realizes they are still The operating system or the business is too dependent on them, what would you tell them to fix first?

Well, my capacity engineering framework, the first part of it is the F. It's filter. Filter. The first thing I'll always look to do is put a big filtering system in place. Because the filter is what's going to filter out that wall of noise. People, texts, you know, emails, calls, all that noise. That, that we talked about earlier, that, that cost of that invisible tax, 11 to 24 minutes every time. What I want to do is get rid of that invisible tax straight away because that does a couple of things. Number one is a very kind of hidden benefit of doing it is we start to calm our nervous system. A lot of people right now these days are in flight or flight response because it's all reactive. This thing, that thing popped up, something's over here. Even if we don't have something to react to, we're almost looking first. That's why we check our phones so much.

Yeah, you can check your inbox, which has zero emails, and you'll sit there and just like refresh, pull to refresh, just waiting for something to happen then so you can react to it.

Absolutely. So by filtering that noise, first of all, doing some of the things like we talked about, it could be, for me, it's notifications off. It's funneling power blocks into your calendar for like emails, calls. Okay. It could be routing calls in a certain direction. If too many of those calls are still coming to you, it could be a member of your team. It could be A virtual assistant, an AI assistant. It's filtering that noise down as a starting point. It's those open door time slots we have so people aren't coming to you drip, drip, drip through the day. Because what happens when you do that, it's almost like you just feel straight away like you have more time. Guess what? You do have more time. You feel calmer. You feel more in control. Your nervous system starts to calm and get out of that flight or fight response that it's most likely in right now. Your head is clearer, you have more energy, but the other thing it does is it allows you to just start getting back to yourself again. Start getting back to the person that you were in terms of energy, in terms of ability to focus, in terms of getting your joy back for the business. It starts actually to bring all those other things back into your life.

Mm-hmm.

When you combine that with the actual invisible tax that we take out there, People make huge savings just by doing those things alone, just by actually filtering that noise right down. That's where I'd always do the step. Because think about it, you could have the best systems in the world, but where are you going to get the time to work on the business if you still get interrupted, distracted, emails, calls, there's all this sort of noise in your life? It's not really going to happen. It's not going to happen. So it's filtering that noise down as a starting point.

Barry, I want to leave everybody with some practical tips. And what you said was that you have your notifications silenced most of the time. So that's on your computer as well as your phone. No distractions. For example, LinkedIn can send you a notification every time somebody is breathing on there. Some of these apps and platforms are designed just to distract you from everything else you're doing.

Yeah.

So are there any notifications you keep on? What's your practical system that I can do? So for example, I don't keep refreshing my Substack notifications every single hour because I get easily distracted.

Yeah. Like, I'll probably call that our bubble method. It's where we want to eliminate possibility first because the Best willpower in the world. Like sometimes people tell me, but Barry, look at the notification comes in and I don't look at it. No, I just keep working. I'm very good like that. But even just hearing that notification, it's fractured your attention. You're making micro decisions. Will I open it now? Will I not? Will I keep it till later? Yeah, you are whether you even think about it or not. The first thing is I'd be blocking like digital distractions. That's the B. And it's all notifications off, all of them off. All of them off. If it's important enough, somebody will get you, somebody will phone you. Get away. All notifications go off. I'd always rearrange my phone as well so that when I open up the phone, the first screen on my phone actually is like the 4 or 5 key apps I probably use every day. I delete all social media off my phone. I use social media. I'm not— I heard that. Or disciplined enough to say, oh, just like, I still go to social media. I don't go down that rabbit hole. I can use it. But like, again, I, we talk about reducing steps. I add friction to things like that where now I delete Instagram, Facebook. I need to use it for work and different stuff, but I'll have to log into the browser on my phone or desktop to get in, which means that extra step means I don't normally do it. I don't do it unconsciously, anything like that. It's a really conscious decision, which means I rarely do it. So again, when I open my phone, it's not cluttered with notifications, apps, all that other stuff. Only the key stuff I might need. Notifications are all off. The other things is like things we talked about, where there are sources of noise coming from. I always say it's not that you don't do it, it's when you do it. It's having those windows in your day when you can. What I do is say, whatever time every day, I go into my emails, I check my phone, WhatsApps, Slack messages, LinkedIn messages, all those other things, Instagram. I go through them all. I blast them all. I have a playbook there that I go through one at a time. Hit them all in that window and then get back out. I'd say for people is don't start what you think you need. Start with a little bit time that's a little bit shorter than that. So if you think, Jesus, I probably need maybe an hour for all this stuff, set it for maybe 45 minutes. I'd always say don't run to the perfect. Start with that and then you could tweak it based on how it runs for you. Always start with something though. Start with, say, a block in your calendar. It could be half an hour, it could be 45 minutes morning and afternoon.

Mm-hmm.

Where you funnel all those communication type stuff into that window. And then I go through my process, depends on how many emails I have. I start there, then I move on to the Instagram and LinkedIn and all those other messages. And I almost gamify it. I have my little timer going off there. It's 45 minutes and I gamify it. How many of these can I actually blast through in 45 minutes? So it's like I've set a little mini deadline on myself as well on it. And often through, I get it through way quicker, you know, it's a massive focus.

It's like a challenge. Do you take, you get the dopamine rush from doing that challenge rather than checking the notifications themselves?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I do. Yeah. There's my little timer there in the background. Goes off. I have a little timer there I set for different time periods. And that is my challenge. Yeah. And it does actually does help with those little mini dopamine hits. My day is not a constant dopamine hit of everything, but that, yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. It's a nice little reward.

I like this idea, Barry. And I think you convinced me to try to silence my notifications on particular blocks of the day.

Yeah.

I will make sure that in my power blocks, I do do the morning routine of tackling the hardest task first. So what I will also do is make sure that I silence all my notifications Exactly. Around that block. So if anything's gonna take anything away from this episode, it will be this.

Filter the noise.

Filter the noise. Thank you so much for some of your tips and tricks and advice, Barry. And I'm looking forward to report back to anybody listening how this went up for me. Daniel, it was a pleasure. Thanks for tuning in all the way to the end That's the end of this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with someone you think would get value from it. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode. For the best way to stay in the loop, head to millennialmasters.net. That's where you'll get all the latest features and new episodes straight to your inbox every week. Catch you next week.